This lecture explores the factors affecting post-rebel party electoral performance. We present new research tracking the participation of these groups in national legislative elections from 1990 through 2016. Our full dataset covers 77 parties and 286 elections in 37 countries. It includes parties formed after conflicts of varying length and intensity, with different incompatibilities, in every region of the world, and in countries with disparate political histories. Our analysis suggests post-rebel parties’ early electoral performance strongly affects future performance, and that competition -- crowdout by older rival parties – and pre-war organizational experience in politics has a significant positive effect, particularly for those parties that are winning more than about 10% of seats consistently. But especially for parties that consistently win very low seat shares, organizational characteristics yield increasingly to environmental factors, most importantly the presence of rival parties and the barriers to representation presented by electoral rules.